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Lot Essay
Peter Doig’s Lion in the Road (Port of Spain) (2020) has been generously donated by the artist as part of BUILD IT, BEAT IT, a selection of artworks sold to raise funds towards the building of the Children’s Cancer Centre at Great Ormond Street Hospital. The creature meets our gaze with an air of regal wisdom. Cropped close, the picture brings us into proximity with his greenish eyes and rich orange mane. He glows against a bright yellow wall, with a flash of cobalt-blue sky visible beyond. A figure can be glimpsed walking around the corner. Painted in dispersion—a suspension of finely-ground pigment that allows for luminous, saturated colour—Doig’s liquid brushwork creates a vision of dreamlike intensity.
Lions emerged as an important motif in Doig’s work in 2015, when he showed a number of paintings on the theme at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice. In Christian iconography the winged lion represents Saint Mark the Evangelist, the city’s patron saint. It has become the emblem of Venice, and is a common theme in its wealth of Renaissance art. While Doig’s paintings chimed with these Venetian lions, they were in fact inspired by the Lion of Judah: an equally ubiquitous icon in Port of Spain, in Trinidad, the island Doig made his home in 2002. Derived from a Biblical image of Christ, in Rastafarian tradition the Lion of Judah stands for the Emperor Haile Selassie I, and is a symbol of strength, pride and sovereignty.
Having spent part of his childhood there, Doig’s return to Trinidad in the new millennium saw him engage increasingly with themes drawn from the life of the island. He took numerous photographs of a lion he saw in Port of Spain’s zoo, which he remembered visiting as a child. These pictures became the basis for his paintings. He was also attracted to the various versions of the Lion of Judah symbol he saw throughout the city, painted on walls in a range of individual styles. The idea of an image changing through different interpretations and across time is central to Doig’s work. Variously drawing upon found imagery, his own photographs and personal memories of a life lived between Canada, the Caribbean and the United Kingdom, he uses the mutability of paint to explore the shifting, associative qualities of identity, history and place.
Doig pitied the caged lion he saw in the zoo, and imagined it set free in his paintings. He depicted several versions of the animal in front of the distinctive yellow wall of Port of Spain’s prison, which also appears in the present work. No longer a captive, Doig’s lion becomes a mercurial, multivalent creature, resounding with art-historical, personal and literary echoes. With its benign expression, Lion in the Road (Port of Spain) particularly recalls the lion’s time-honoured incarnation as an attribute of Saint Jerome, who is said to have removed a thorn from a lion’s paw while living as a hermit in the desert. This miraculous détente between man and beast was reprised in Henri Rousseau’s iconic Sleeping Gypsy (1897, Museum of Modern Art, New York): a painting that shares something of the mystical, visionary magic of Doig’s own work. The lion, like the artist himself, is a wanderer between worlds.
Lions emerged as an important motif in Doig’s work in 2015, when he showed a number of paintings on the theme at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice. In Christian iconography the winged lion represents Saint Mark the Evangelist, the city’s patron saint. It has become the emblem of Venice, and is a common theme in its wealth of Renaissance art. While Doig’s paintings chimed with these Venetian lions, they were in fact inspired by the Lion of Judah: an equally ubiquitous icon in Port of Spain, in Trinidad, the island Doig made his home in 2002. Derived from a Biblical image of Christ, in Rastafarian tradition the Lion of Judah stands for the Emperor Haile Selassie I, and is a symbol of strength, pride and sovereignty.
Having spent part of his childhood there, Doig’s return to Trinidad in the new millennium saw him engage increasingly with themes drawn from the life of the island. He took numerous photographs of a lion he saw in Port of Spain’s zoo, which he remembered visiting as a child. These pictures became the basis for his paintings. He was also attracted to the various versions of the Lion of Judah symbol he saw throughout the city, painted on walls in a range of individual styles. The idea of an image changing through different interpretations and across time is central to Doig’s work. Variously drawing upon found imagery, his own photographs and personal memories of a life lived between Canada, the Caribbean and the United Kingdom, he uses the mutability of paint to explore the shifting, associative qualities of identity, history and place.
Doig pitied the caged lion he saw in the zoo, and imagined it set free in his paintings. He depicted several versions of the animal in front of the distinctive yellow wall of Port of Spain’s prison, which also appears in the present work. No longer a captive, Doig’s lion becomes a mercurial, multivalent creature, resounding with art-historical, personal and literary echoes. With its benign expression, Lion in the Road (Port of Spain) particularly recalls the lion’s time-honoured incarnation as an attribute of Saint Jerome, who is said to have removed a thorn from a lion’s paw while living as a hermit in the desert. This miraculous détente between man and beast was reprised in Henri Rousseau’s iconic Sleeping Gypsy (1897, Museum of Modern Art, New York): a painting that shares something of the mystical, visionary magic of Doig’s own work. The lion, like the artist himself, is a wanderer between worlds.